That is really not at all the numbers ive encountered.Ive seen we take maybe slightly more damage than monks, and pretty equal to warriors.Druids should take less damage i guess with so high dodge, but they are instable to heal.Also a fight like Will of the Emperor is a fight where druids are really good in terms of taking less damage due to the limited time the bosses even hit you.And Im assuming both of you did a fairly good job a dodging the strikes, aka avoiding armor debuffs?But like Fridmarr says, if the norm is we take almost 50% more damage but makes up for it with SoI, its a very bad trade-off indeed.

Treck wrote:Also a fight like Will of the Emperor is a fight where druids are really good in terms of taking less damage due to the limited time the bosses even hit you.

Yes, that is about as large as the swing gets, and you're right that druids do very well on it. My high level point is just that Seal of Insight is (to me at least) obviously the intended tanking seal, and that our tanking has been designed with that self-healing in mind. I don't think they ever intended for us to use Seal of Truth on progression. I could see from Censure being my top damage source in beta raids (especially with the fact that you can keep it up on two targets, e.g., Stone Guard) that it was going to get nerfed.

Treck wrote:And Im assuming both of you did a fairly good job a dodging the strikes, aka avoiding armor debuffs?\

Yes, we both got #1 parses in our respective classes.

Treck wrote:But like Fridmarr says, if the norm is we take almost 50% more damage but makes up for it with SoI, its a very bad trade-off indeed.

Note I said Sacred Shield as well as Seal of Insight, so it's not *that* bad.

As you rightfully point out, Will of the Emperor is probably a more extreme case than other fights. It is just a good basis for comparison since the two tanks are doing the exact same thing and have approximately equal Vengeance. Since both my co-tank and I danced correctly, we were able to really take a look at the damage numbers. You make a very good point about how well a druid can do with avoidance though during that fight, and so that makes a big difference.

I could probably have done less damage and held SotR in reserve as well for non-dance times, so I could have taken less damage at the cost of dealing less damage (a trade-off I didn't have to make on normal mode).

So I was doing some AoE farming in dread wastes for motes of harmony and I noticed that, especially on larger pulls, I was self healing for an absurd amount without doing anything in particular. On further investigation I'm pretty sure that hammer of the righteous can cause a SoI proc for each target hit and also (when using it in dread wastes) a battle hymn proc (each proc being a heal for 1% of max health).

This is possibly not intended and is sure as hell isn't balanced with the hymn, when a guildy was there helping me pull more I had 20 mobs on me and as soon as one died to enable battle hymn each HotR was healing me for 25% of my health. As a side note I'm in love with the blade turning augment - being as how it dealt 50% of all my damage in that farming session.

Kihra wrote:My high level point is just that Seal of Insight is (to me at least) obviously the intended tanking seal, and that our tanking has been designed with that self-healing in mind.

Well I'm not sure about that, there seems to be a lot of sloppy mechanics for it to have been designed as the primary tanking seal. Future patches will tell the tale there though. I don't doubt that they thought it might be used in situations where the boss is a tank check, but generally you would want some sort of trade off, where this seal seems to be maximum survivability which also generates absurd amounts of threat. If they are Ok with threat being trivial, well that's just unfortunate.

Kihra wrote:Note I said Sacred Shield as well as Seal of Insight, so it's not *that* bad.

Well look, I don't know all the details of damage intake across tanking classes nor the way EH or other balance points compare. You may well be right that it is balanced. However, with other elements being balanced, taking 46% more damage is significantly inferior to receiving 46% more healing.

According to a couple of guild healers, I went from "somewhat tedious to heal" to "why aren't we doing this with 4 dps? I feel useless" when I swapped to SoI. No gear changes or real play-style changes.

In the past, Blizzard has repeatedly said that they do not care if threat generation is trivial, and that if it becomes non-trivial they are willing to take steps to make it trivial again.

Pyrea wrote:In the past, Blizzard has repeatedly said that they do not care if threat generation is trivial, and that if it becomes non-trivial they are willing to take steps to make it trivial again.

That's sad. It ought to be an important part of tanking it certainly has been in the past. Threat doesn't have to be killer, but if it's trivial their idea about "choice" becomes sort of nonsense.

Though even when threat was trivial they nerfed exactly this type of threat (judgement of light) because of the additional problem it creates. Healing threat like that applies to mobs that the tank hasn't hit, making one of the more daunting tasks in some fights, add pickup, also trivial.

Pyrea wrote:According to a couple of guild healers, I went from "somewhat tedious to heal" to "why aren't we doing this with 4 dps? I feel useless" when I swapped to SoI. No gear changes or real play-style changes.

Pyrea wrote:In the past, Blizzard has repeatedly said that they do not care if threat generation is trivial, and that if it becomes non-trivial they are willing to take steps to make it trivial again.

That's sad. It ought to be an important part of tanking it certainly has been in the past. Threat doesn't have to be killer, but if it's trivial their idea about "choice" becomes sort of nonsense.

The problem with threat being non-trivial is that it becomes the defining characteristic of the raid. Threat management was an ever-loving pain in the ass in Vanilla and BC. The dps of the entire raid being aggressively constrained by a single member is questionable design.

A hotfix will be applied to adjust how Vengeance stacks for tanks of all classes:

Vengeance should now ramp up more quickly. Avoidance will now grant Vengeance based on the average damage of the avoided NPC auto-attack, instead of just refreshing existing Vengeance. This does not apply to enemy special attacks.

This will be noted in the next hotfix update, but we wanted to let you know immediately, as this change will be applied sometime today.

gibborim wrote:The problem with threat being non-trivial is that it becomes the defining characteristic of the raid. Threat management was an ever-loving pain in the ass in Vanilla and BC. The dps of the entire raid being aggressively constrained by a single member is questionable design.

I think we are working from different definitions of the word trivial. I think there is a world of difference between trival and actually threatcapping folks. There is a ridiculous amount of room there to make threat interesting and not a pain. BC threat was actually reasonably solid until fairly late, which is what vengeance was eventually invented to address. Regardless that's a philisophical debate that we shouldn't digress into in this thread.

There is still the issue of the healing threat's effect on adds assuming it's actually behaving the way people are suggesting.

A hotfix will be applied to adjust how Vengeance stacks for tanks of all classes:

Vengeance should now ramp up more quickly. Avoidance will now grant Vengeance based on the average damage of the avoided NPC auto-attack, instead of just refreshing existing Vengeance. This does not apply to enemy special attacks.

This will be noted in the next hotfix update, but we wanted to let you know immediately, as this change will be applied sometime today.

Interesting

I *think* this is a good thing, since *most* boss specials are not avoidable anyway. This should just mean we get Vengeance credit for avoidance.

I am not sure, though, since if you have Vengeance from Big Boss Special that hit you, you want to refresh that as long as possible and not replace it with Vengeance based on Wimpy Boss Auto-Attack (not that we have the sort of avoidance to do that for any length of time).

It should smooth things out for streaks when starting from zero Vengeance. I imagine in cases where the boss melee is a relatively low percentage of the total damage, this will reduce Vengeance slightly on average. I'm okay with that if it means quicker ramp-ups from slow/no damage.

With respect to Will of the Emperor tank balance, we were fairly well matched as Prot/Feral on our kill tonight:Psiven (P): 25408266 DT (34.3%) -- 14 strikes in 11:53Slashlove (D): 22452867 DT (30.3%) -- 13 strikes in 11:53

I noticed that it was VERY important how I timed my ShoR for the short facepunch phases, and judicious use of Holy Avenger definitely helped. There was roughly a 10% difference here in damage taken. However, SoI + Battle Insight were responsible for about 6 million total healing. Seems like a fair trade-off, although the insane healing threat is very annoying for the Strength tank.

PsiVen wrote:I noticed that it was VERY important how I timed my ShoR for the short facepunch phases, and judicious use of Holy Avenger definitely helped. There was roughly a 10% difference here in damage taken. However, SoI + Battle Insight were responsible for about 6 million total healing. Seems like a fair trade-off, although the insane healing threat is very annoying for the Strength tank.

We actually un-glyphed Battle Healer for that fight, simply because it was causing more problems than it solved. The random aggro on adds led to one or two wipes before we decided the extra healing simply wasn't worth it.

Pyrea wrote:In the past, Blizzard has repeatedly said that they do not care if threat generation is trivial, and that if it becomes non-trivial they are willing to take steps to make it trivial again.

Wasn´t that before they changed the threat multipliers etc. I think at that point they said that they won´t keep threat as a meaningful mechanic. Wasn´t the introduction of active mitigation something that is supposed to replace threat as the thing tanks do?

Ok probably they don´t want paladins to be a black hole sucking in every add that is spawning so they probably change the seal.

That was when they changed the threat modifiers, saying that this was the first step to changing the approach to tanking.

This is the post in question:

Given all of that, and watching how tanking has unfolded in Cataclysm, we’ve gotten over the concept that threat needs to be a major part of PvE gameplay. We have therefore decided to buff tank threat generation in a hotfix this week to where it’s generally not a major consideration. We expect the community to gradually stop using threat-tracking mods as players realize they don’t need them.

It’s an important distinction that the concept of “aggro” will still exist. If a DPS spec attacks an add the second it shows up, then the creature is going to come at her. However, if a tank gets an attack or two on a target, then the target should stick to the tank. Worrying about who has the creature’s attention should generally only be a concern at the start of a fight or when additional creatures join the battle. Worrying about a warrior or DK (the classes with nearly non-existent threat dumps) creeping up on tank threat after several minutes will almost certainly not be an issue any longer. (And if it is, we’ll have to make further adjustments.)

Ghostcrawler went on to talk about the "endgame" of their design:

You could argue that once threat is very easy to manage that a warrior tank could just go AFK. In reality, given today’s boss encounters, an AFK warrior would end up standing in the wrong place, missing a tank transition, or otherwise do something or fail to do something that wipes the party or raid.

That said, we ultimately don’t want tanking to be just standing there soaking boss hits and we would like to have more stats on gear that tanks care about. To solve those challenges, we want to shift more tank mitigation to require active management. We’ll still give all the tanks emergency cooldowns like Shield Wall and Survival Instincts. However, we want to move the shorter cooldowns like Shield Block, Holy Shield and Savage Defense so that they work more like Death Strike. Blood DKs have a lot of control over the survivability they get from Death Strike, but as part of that gameplay, they have to actually hit their target. The other three tanks will get similar active defense mechanics. This doesn’t mean everyone needs to use the DK model of self-healing, but they can use the DK model of managing resources to maximize survivability.

We actually un-glyphed Battle Healer for that fight, simply because it was causing more problems than it solved. The random aggro on adds led to one or two wipes before we decided the extra healing simply wasn't worth it.

This was a true story on Elegon.

Protector spawns.*Psiven has 500k threat*Growl + Faerie Fire*Psiven has 800k threat*WTF?Mangle. It's not very effective. Psiven has 1.3 million threat.Growl comes back up.

It hasn't happened again; so I think it was a combination of SoI/BI as well as just a realllllly perfectly timed Holy Prism, but random healing threat is slightly silly in general with this philosophy.

This is a side note, but for people who haven't cottoned on or are like "LOL Wrath, why Blizzard laugh at Paladins", getting Symbiosis from a Druid and Wrathing as Prot does ridiculous damage.

I took a look at raidbot for some clue about protection dps and I am quite disappointed about our situation. DK dps is first pretty much in every fight by far (10%) and paladin is at best in 3rd position. Since tank dps do matter, we're not in a good spot.

Darielle wrote:This is a side note, but for people who haven't cottoned on or are like "LOL Wrath, why Blizzard laugh at Paladins", getting Symbiosis from a Druid and Wrathing as Prot does ridiculous damage.

Does wrath have a cast time for Prot, or is it given to us as instant cast?